Wolf Gugler is president of Wolf Gugler Executive Search. He specializes in landing roles for hardware companies in Canada and the U.S., especially in sales and marketing. With Canada’s unemployment rate running at 5.5 percent last month, “It’s still a candidate’s market,” he says.
As a result, companies looking to hire can be at a disadvantage. And that means the process of hiring can’t be a long one, Gugler warns. The days of three, four, and even five interviews are over. Nowadays, he’s seeing many candidates receiving multiple job offers. For companies looking to hire, he says, “in many cases, if you don’t move quickly enough, that talent goes by the wayside.”
The effects of timeliness work at different levels. It’s not just a matter of securing the right candidate before someone else does. It can also be indicative of management culture. That means a candidate can evaluate your company based on how long it takes to make the hire.
Gugler says candidates have shared with him their concern about the culture of a company that’s doing the hire. Dragging out the hire may demonstrate to the candidate that your company is indecisive or struggling with too many layers of authority to respond quickly. “The timeliness part is demonstrative of how a company runs their business. So the candidate sees that your hiring process is stretched out or indecisive, or whatever the case might be, so then they relate it to, ‘Is that the way it’s going to be when I’m on board and I need a decision made?’”
His advice to any HR department? “Make sure you have a good relationship with your senior team. Try to do whatever you can to build that line of communication and trust, so when they say, ‘I have a need, here it is, take care of it,’ the HR team can go ahead and take care of what they need to do.” Then, when HR presents the short list of candidates, trust that they’ve brought you strong potential hires.
